General guide to scripting in Dromed

slavatrumpevitch on 25/9/2016 at 20:42

Hi all,

has anyone compiled a general guide to scripting in Dromed? I often find tutorials (or responses to the questions I post here) that allow me to achieve a highly specific goal, but I don't find that I've gained much generalizable knowledge about how to tackle different but related tasks in the future. Does such a general tutorial exist?

Thanks!

LarryG on 25/9/2016 at 21:01

Are you a C++ programmer?

slavatrumpevitch on 25/9/2016 at 21:31

I am. Not a great one, but I do alright. I'm a data scientist, so most of the coding I do is in R, Stata or Python, but I'm fairly familiar with objected oriented programming in C++.

That said, there's still a lot of stuff that I know can be achieved from within Dromed that still perplexes me (i.e. without opening up C++). Perhaps 'scripting' was the wrong word to describe what I'm looking to learn. Really I'm referring to all the rigging up that goes into implementing anything outside of the ordinary in thief. For example, in no particular order:

1. Seamless teleportation (as in Sepulchre of Sinistral)
2. An inventory item that gives the first person visual impression of wearing a mask, when used (as in Horn of Canzo 2, mission 2)
3. Making guards respond in an idiosyncratic way to a particular player action (e.g. The guard who shuts off the sprinkler system every time its turned on in Ominous Bequest
4. Triggering an event my dropping an object in a certain location (e.g. the spider jar in Keeper of Infinity

I could go on and on. The point is not to understand how to do any given one of these, but rather to develop a framework that would allow me to figure them out myself. I'm not looking for hand-holding, and I'm not averse to experimentation. But right now I feel like I have no idea where to begin, so my experimentation is fairly fruitless.

R Soul on 25/9/2016 at 22:39

Usually when people here say 'scripting', they don't mean writing scripts, they mean using them, setting up links etc.

The Dromed Toolkit includes a docs folder which includes the original tutorials, including Using Archetype Scripts and Traps & Triggers. Those documents are also in t2docsall, which is here: (http://thiefmissions.com/editors/)

Another useful resource is Telliamed's script descriptions: (http://www.thiefmissions.com/telliamed/scripts.html)

LarryG on 25/9/2016 at 22:52

1. Stickied at the top of this forum: (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144469) Important: Resources for Mission Authors. Have you looked there?
2. (http://dromed.whoopdedo.org/index) The Dromesday Book. Have you looked there? In particular: (http://dromed.whoopdedo.org/public_scripts/index) Public Scripts and (http://dromed.whoopdedo.org/tnhscript/index) tnhScripts, and importantly (http://dromed.whoopdedo.org/dromed/an_introduction_to_custom_scripts) An Introduction to Scripts
3. (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134166) NVScripts
4. And of course the LGS scripts (http://thiefmissions.com/telliamed/scripts.html) gen & convict and the (http://thiefmissions.com/telliamed/scripts1.html) thief1 and (http://thiefmissions.com/telliamed/scripts2.html) thief2 scripts

Read the script documentation and familiarize yourself with what the scripts do and how to invoke them.

Then if you want to get into writing your own scripts, well, you will have enough knowledge to know what isn't already available.

slavatrumpevitch on 26/9/2016 at 04:00

These references are great! Thanks!